Summer’s dead. Fall’s rising. But it’s not cold enough to see your breath—maybe later, when the worst of the storm hits. And on the porch, the clouds aren’t as intimidating. They still loom and consume the mountains and their peaks, and once the sun finishes setting they’ll descend with the rain into the valley. The first hesitant raindrops splat on the tin roof, and the man and his little girl listen and look.
“That’s a hurricane, right Daddy?” asks the girl.
“Right.” He sips on his beer. It’s his second one.
She oooooh’s and aaaahhh’s and wooooooo’s. The clouds are almost white; a touch gray. And each moment, the rain picks up. “But you said they don’t ever get up here.”
“Daddy’s wrong sometimes, hun.”
All confused, the girl looks at her daddy. But she doesn’t say anything else about it.
“What’s this hurricane’s name?” she asks.
“Frances.”
“Why do they give them names?”
“That’s just how they do it.”
She squirms in the creaky wooden rocker like she squirms in her school desk. Her big huge glasses swallow up her dark eyes.
Lightning, from the cloud, high up on the mountain. Thunder follows; the girl jumps. “Is it gonna hurt us, Daddy?”
The man sips his beer—he stops. Looks at his girl’s face, and sets the beer down on the 2-by-4 floor below. He sees his face, and Mary’s too. Sees the same gentle slope of her cheekbones, the subtle cleft chin she left for her daughter. He recalled those nights a decade ago when he and Mary would sit on this porch on mild summer evenings and drink and he would play his guitar and she would sing, sing all night till either the crickets stopped with the rising sun or they passed out together, hands woven.
“No, baby,” he says. “Come sit on my lap.” She nods. Hops down from her rocker—where Mary would sing—and then she hops back up the swing swaying in the intensifying wind. She cuddles into her daddy. “You tell me when you get scared, okay? We can go inside and put up a fire.”
“Watch Spongebob?”
“The power’s out, remember sweetie?”
She tilts her head. “Okay.”
“We can play Candyland.”
“I don’t like that game anymore,” she says.
“Why, honey?”
Now the rain’s picking up. Now the rain pummels the tin roof, and the girl and her daddy have to almost shout so they can hear each other. But the girl’s voice is small, tiny.
“Because we used to play that with Mommy.”
They did. Once a week, probably. Mary loved her board games, so much. In the car that they found her in, there was still that old, beat-up set of Monopoly that they would play before the girl was born.
“Well, we don’t have to play that game.”
“I want to stay out here. I’m not scared.”
“You got it.”
The wind’s coming now, too. It won’t be bad—not like on the coast. But the rain’s heavy. It puddles on the muddy grass out past the porch.
“I love you, Daddy.”
He bites back that sob that always try to come out. He leans in and rests his head on his child’s. “I love you too, baby.”
The rain continues for the rest of the night. By morning, the girl is asleep in her bed and the man crushes his five beer cans in the dumpster, in the sun peaking through the lifting clouds.
